Which classics fall out of copyright in 2012?

[pholy]

Billi - No, the laws state that books enter the public domain on the January 1st following the 70th (50th in Canada) anniversary of the death of the author.

[Billi]

Ah, got it. Thanks!

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Billi

Won't his books be in the public domain just from the 22nd or 23rd of February 2012 on when he is exactly dead for 70 years?

The public domain rules for Life+ is for creators to have died within the previous qualifying year.

Presumably this to avoid quibbling on exactly when someone died if it's ambiguous as to date/month and make it easy to draw up a list of exactly who's definitely PD and who's not as an open-and-shut case rather than have some sort of revolving door-like scenario where stuff exits copyright at less predictable irregular intervals.

ETA for the US people: Duke University's look at What Might Have Been had your copyright laws stuck to 28+28 with renewal and not become completely disneyfied.

Perhaps it and their rather sad version "celebration" of Public Domain Day would make a good primer for educating the newbies on why increasingly indefinite copyright lengths is detrimental to the public good?

[crich70]

Originally Posted by pholy

Billi - No, the laws state that books enter the public domain on the January 1st following the 70th (50th in Canada) anniversary of the death of the author.

Ah, so it's a standard cut off date then. Makes sense. I mean say one author dies Dec. 31st 1941 and another dies Jan 1st 1942. The second author's books would be PD then on Jan 2013 even though he had died just the day after the 1st author.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by osnova

Ok. I'll have to look closer. However, in U.S. a lot used to depend from the date of publication. If the book was never published here, then it could not be renewed under prior U.S. copyright law, ergo, it should be in public domain if it's in the public domain in the country of publication. Given that common sense does not apply to copyright law, I would guess that my seat-of-the-pants analysis is wrong

Complicated indeed.

The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. Since the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier. Copyright protection for works published prior to January 1, 1978, was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date.

This law, also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, effectively "froze" the advancement date of the public domain in the United States for works covered by the older fixed term copyright rules. Under this Act, additional works made in 1923 or afterwards that were still protected by copyright in 1998 will not enter the public domain until 2019 or afterward (depending on the date of the product) unless the owner of the copyright releases them into the public domain prior to that or if the copyright gets extended again.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Perhaps it and their rather sad version "celebration" of Public Domain Day would make a good primer for educating the newbies on why increasingly indefinite copyright lengths is detrimental to the public good?

I don't see it as detrimental. The public didn't create these works, so they have no right to them.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

I don't see it as detrimental. The public didn't create these works, so they have no right to them.

Of course you can see it that way, but I think these few paragraphs quoted from the Duke University site sum up the benefits and drawbacks of current situation fairly well if you want to read them. Spoiler-texted so you can skip a the chunk o'text if you don't.

Spoiler:

Copyright gives creators — authors, musicians, filmmakers, photographers — exclusive rights over their works for a limited time. The copyright encourages the creators to create and the publishers to distribute — that’s a very good thing.

But when the copyright ends, the work enters the public domain — to join the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart, the books of Dickens — the material of our collective culture. That’s a good thing too!

It's the second part of the copyright bargain; the limited period of exclusive rights ends and the work enters the realm of free culture.
...
Even better, people can legally build on what came before.
...
In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing.

What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture.
...
For the works that are still commercially available, the shrinking public domain increases costs to citizens and limits creative reuse. But at least those works are available.

Unfortunately, much of our cultural heritage, perhaps the majority of the culture of the last 80 years, consists of orphan works.

They are not sold anywhere and they have no identifiable copyright holder. Though no one is benefiting from the copyright, they are unavailable: it is illegal to copy, redistribute, or publicly perform them.

Does all this mean that copyright is a bad system? Of course not. Copyright serves an important purpose in facilitating the creation and distribution of creative works.

The basic principles of our copyright system are sound.

But studies like the Gowers Review commissioned by the UK government, empirical comparisons of the availability of copyrighted works and public domain works and recent economic studies of the effects of copyright protection all suggest that lengthy copyright extensions impose costs that far outweigh their benefits.

In fact, economists who have modeled the ideal copyright term have uniformly suggested that it should be far shorter than it is right now.

The full set of points they present on their website is a lot more eloquent.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Of course you can see it that way, but I think these few paragraphs quoted from the Duke University site sum up the benefits and drawbacks of current situation fairly well if you want to read them. Spoiler-texted so you can skip a the chunk o'text if you don't.

I understand where they're coming from; I just don't don't agree with it.

I personally see no difference between intellectual property and tangible property. If an author has to give up his rights 70 years after death, then so should a farmer. If society benefits from a book entering public domain, then society will also benefit when a farm enters public domain.

[osnova]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

I personally see no difference between intellectual property and tangible property. If an author has to give up his rights 70 years after death, then so should a farmer. If society benefits from a book entering public domain, then society will also benefit when a farm enters public domain.

And yet, differences there are:

1. Tangible property is pretty much fungible (unless it's a work of art or protected by a patent). IP is not. So, monopoly over IP is monopoly over a unique product. To make my point, think of somebody owning the Grand Canyon or entire Mississippi. Which leads us to the second point.

2. PD is a building block for something new. There would be great harm to artistic creation without PD. Think of what would be of Disney without the following PD works: Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Alice in Wonderland, the Nutcracker, the Jungle Book (Disney released their version exactly 1 year after the expiration of the copyright). Most of music in Fantasia was PD. Did the society benefit from Disney using PD? Yes. Did Disney benefit from PD as well? Yes. Should Disney be interested in keeping PD alive? Yes... that is if they want to create something new; not just bring out their old stuff from their vault to resell it on a new medium.

What would be of our literature without Shakespeare in the public domain. Shakespeare would not be able to write many of his works without PD (Romeo and Juliet taken from Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, historical plays taken from Chronicles of England by Raphael Hollingshead). The movie/cartoon/music/publishing industries would not be the same. They take but don't want to give.

3. Taking a farm away from the farmer is depriving him or his heirs of the farm (i.e. he will have no farm). Releasing copyrighted works into public domain does not deprive the author or his heirs of the works. Moreover, IP is a legal fiction (i.e. legal creation). There would be no IP without IP statutes that were invented in 18th century (see the Statute of Anne of 1710). Ownership of tangible property has been with us as long as man existed. Ownership of tangible property is an innate concept that you do not need to explain to anyone even in communist countries (they fight it but it's a battle that they always invariably lose). To explain IP ownership, you need a constant bombardment of airwaves and weird ads at the beginning of DVDs. In legal parlance, theft of tangible property is a malum-in-se crime, while theft of IP is a malum-prohibitum crime. No amount of reeducation of the populace will help to change it.

4. Finally, Disney laws have made mockery of the U.S. Constitution (and Supreme Court decisions on this topic) and brought our legal system into ridicule and disrepute among the people (as in "We the People). Congress's blatant preoccupation with interests of moneyed "constituencies" (Disney et al.) to the detriment of the public interest shows that there are laws that are not people's laws, they are lobbyists' laws. In other words this is another proof that Congress is beholden to special interests.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by osnova

And yet, differences there are:

I know. That doesn't necessarily make these laws correct. Laws can change.

Finally, taking a farm away from the farmer is depriving him of the farm (i.e. he will have no farm).

He doesn't lose it anymore than an author loses his book. It wouldn't enter into PD until 70 years after his death; just like a book.

[osnova]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

He doesn't lose it anymore than an author loses his book. It wouldn't enter into PD until 70 years after his death; just like a book.

Ok. I think you are building a strawman here.

[osnova]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

I don't see it as detrimental. The public didn't create these works, so they have no right to them.

Oh, and... society did create these works. The society created the individual and let him develop and live in its environment. It educated him in literature and art. It gave him what to work with.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by osnova

Ok. I think you are building a strawman here.

It's how I feel. I see no difference in what one chooses to create. These creations should all receive the same protections.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by osnova

Oh, and... society did create these works. The society created the individual and let him develop and live in its environment. It educated him in literature and art. It gave him what to work with.

Just like the farmer? the business owner?

I think we should stop here; else this thread will be moving to the political section.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by osnova

Oh, and... society did create these works. The society created the individual and let him develop and live in its environment. It educated him in literature and art. It gave him what to work with.

Society didn't create the individual, the author's parents did. And they also paid taxes for his education.

Anyway, as tubemonkey says, this could go back and forth for a long time, I just wanted to add this.